I Try It So You Don’t Have To: Emergency Meal Lasagna

Seems that I have found myself in a disaster preparedness theme. This week I received three modern MRE’s from Wise Food Storage for my continued culinary adventures. My options were cheesy lasagna, noodles and beef in mushroom sauce and pasta alfredo with chicken.

I knew that trying all three of them would result in a lot of waste so I picked the one that I knew my daughter would like in case of complete failure. Each of these packages has a massive shelf life, up to 25 years according to their web site. In my experience massive shelf life does not equal delicious. In a real doomsday scenario I would not have my handy dandy electric kettle to rapidly boil the required water for my pouch o’ food, but hey no one says this has to be a field test.

The instructions could not be easier, open bag, boil water, add water to bag, seal bag and let it cook. I can handle that. I opened the bag and it smelled pretty good. If you have ever opened a seasoning package for hamburger helper or a can of lasagna then you know what this smells like. Tomato, a hint of beefiness and some spices like oregano are readily apparent. I added my water and let it set as described. The smell after cooking was no different, the look was not so good.

Now I must say, this was prior to stirring and you would expect that all of the seasonings and smaller pieces would float to the top, regardless this looked more like something I had deposited in the bag rather than something I was going to take out and enjoy. For sure it didn’t look like this:

But how does it taste? It tastes salty. It also has a slight spiciness to it from what I believe to be ground sausage, that goes along well with the beef. There was no cheese to speak of other than a very spaghetti O like cheesy tomato sauce. There was some tomato flavor as well. All together it was a good mix of salty, beefy and tomato sauce. The noodles were actually cooked pretty well and provided the texture this bag of grub needed. Once it was all mixed up and in a bowl it didn’t look bad either.

My 6 year old daughter loved it, which is a good sign for my family’s apocalypse survivability. This modern MRE gets a Try it, in the event of an apocalypse or a hungry 6 year old girl looking for dinner. Which may well be one and the same.